Steps for Building Your Site’s SEO

Actions steps you can take to help you get started in SEO by using the tools you already have. Instead of having to invest time into learning keyword research, which is still important to do eventually, you can tackle low hanging fruit.

1 | Craft an About Page & Author Bio

When someone comes to your website for the first time, they usually check out your about page as the next step to make sure you’re legit. It’s the same concept as someone who checks out your grid after seeing an Instagram post of yours for the first time because they want to learn more and see if they should follow you.

Your about page and bio need to do a couple of things to help your search engine rankings and build your authority online:

Show off your qualifications of why someone should pay attention to your content
Include ways to verify you’re a trustworthy source of information
Encourage visitors to stick around because they’re in the right place for them
Worried that you’re not an “expert”? Don’t worry! Google also sees personal experience as a type of expertise they call an everyday expert. You’re an expert on your experience!

Share your personal experiences, education, and qualifications
Include testimonials, comments, reviews, places you’ve been featured, or other ways people can see others’ opinions of you
Include a call-to-action to get people to stick around and increase engagement
You can include this info both on your about page, in your sidebar bio, or your author bio on posts. Make sure it’s easy to find out more information about you on your website!

2 | Create Cornerstone Content

What is one thing your entire audience can benefit from? What questions does your audience always have? Create some content about that!

In SEO, we call this kind of content cornerstone content because it builds a foundation of authority content on your website. It’s one of my favorite ways to help my clients because these kinds of posts can bring boatloads of traffic to your website long after you hit publish without any other promotion on your part!

Cornerstone content works because it’s:

Always relevant content

Helps solve your audience’s most common problems

Requires a one-time investment of your time to create instead of constant creation and promotion

Attracts links from your niche and other authorities online

Most bloggers create content that’s only useful for a short period of time, like their latest outfits with affiliate links that will eventually sell out. Instead, cornerstone content is posts like “how to style a red dress” with information that is always relevant.

That’s also why it’s a link attracting the kind of content you need to have. After all, links are the most important part of SEO these days!

As a pro tip, instead of including affiliate links that will become outdated on these kinds of cornerstone content posts, building your email list, getting people to follow you on social media, or selling them a product are all ways you can keep your content converting in the future and best benefiting you with all that traffic.

3 | Get your website talking to Google

Finding a theme that is SEO-friendly is just the first step to making sure your website meets Google’s requirements for a top ranking website.

Google looks for sites that:

Work on all mobile devices

Load quickly

Have technical elements that help Google understand the website, context, and content

Don’t manipulate visitors with popups, tons of ads, or coercive features to trick people

Buying a theme that is well-coded is the first step but then working to make sure you hit these other points is the next step:

Install and use Yoast to help Google understand your content.

Size your images correctly and compress them for faster loading.

Think strategically about using popups, ads, and other features in your content and how they should be serving your audience, not you!

Invest in good hosting and CDN if you have an image and design heavy website.

Don’t let SEO overwhelm you!

SEO is easy to get overwhelmed by, especially since it feels like a really technical thing and there’s a lot of difficult to understand advice out there. But the truth is that most of SEO that really matters these days isn’t keyword optimization or technical SEO, it’s understanding your audience and creating content they’re going to love. If you follow these steps above, you’ll have started to dip your toes into SEO. It’s that easyto get started optimizing your website for search engines. If you want to dive deeper into doing SEO on your site, be sure to sign up for my weekly SEO newsletter where I send out tips on how to use SEO and the latest changes and research about how to do better in search results.